Krauthammer’s Take

The content of what he said was quite strange. He’s in denial. He said: Well, people — they misunderstood and thought I’m trying to expand the government because I was in a hurry to do stuff. But there was no hurry on health care, there was no demand on health care, there was no emergency on health care. In fact he and other Democrats said openly the reason they were attempting it was because it was going to be historic — that the Democrats had attempted it ever since Harry Truman and they looked at it as a historic obligation.

And then on cap-and-trade, which is energy, which is unbelievably intrusive into every enterprise, essentially a tax on energy, which affects everyone in the market [economy], there was no hurry on that. There was no emergency. There was no clamor. …

When he was asked about three times at the beginning of the press conference, ‘Do you think people were repudiating you or voting against the health-care plan?’ And he acted as if he was being questioned about the natural order of stuff, as if the reporters were questioning the elliptical orbit of the planets. He couldn’t understand how anybody could not see the beneficence of health-care reform. …

He gets this incredible landslide against him and his policies — and he believes … that the progress isn’t rapid enough. He’s just had a refutation of two years of his agenda and his ideology, and he pretends as if nothing has happened.

And he says one of the messages he gets, and it’s all about what does he get, is that people want him to work with Republicans on things like natural gas and electric cars. Is that why he lost 19 state houses, because he hadn’t had enough discussions on electric cars and natural gas with Mitch McConnell? I think not.

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